Zoolander
2 opens with the excessively bloody murder of a pop star and follows that
up with a joke that uses our collective memory of the attacks of September 11,
2001 as a setup. The first is forgivable, because the pop star is in on the joke
and it has a good punch line, but the second one is confounding. This is, after
all, a sequel to a movie that used the planned assassination of a foreign leader
as its central plot point. One would think 15 years might have given the
returning screenwriters a bit of time to consider questions of taste. Maybe they
have, since they shifted from creating a fictional, potential tragedy for a
series of jokes to using misdirection as a means to exploit a real one for a
single joke.

It is a
single joke, though, so perhaps it doesn't necessitate too much scrutiny. By the
time the movie's time-passing montage ends, the joke feels like a distant
memory. It's just a momentary, isolated miscalculation in a movie that has more
substantial ones.

The
screenplay by Justin Theroux, director Ben Stiller, Nicholas Stoller, and John
Hamburg also makes up for one of the first movie's most significant flaws. In
that one, there was never really a voice of reason. Yes, there was the
journalist who saw through Derek Zoolander's (Stiller) inability to understand
even the most basic of concepts. She was also the love interest of the story,
though, meaning she was forced to remain politely silent on the topic. The only
character to actually call him out on his stupidity was the villain, who was
just as a ridiculous as the eponymous character. It didn't work, because a fool
calling out another fool doesn't change the fact that both are fools.

The
sequel gives the vapid, stupid, and narcissistic male model of the title the
foil that he desperately needs and deserves. It comes in the form of Derek's son
Derek Jr. (Cyrus Arnold), an intelligent teenager who isn't afraid to say that
his father is a vapid, stupid, and narcissistic person. The two characters only
have a couple of scenes together, but they are easily the movie's funniest. The
jokes are focused within these scenes. The dynamic between the two characters
reveals both the extent to which Derek is out of touch with normal human
behavior and even a little bit of depth to the character (not too much,
obviously).

The
rest of the movie relies on assembling a random series of jokes with little
attempt to string them together. In a way, the screenplay is smart in how it
almost refuses to offer us any coherent form of a plot. At the start, Derek, who
has become a "hermit crab" in the middle of nowhere in northern New
Jersey (amusingly portrayed as an arctic, mountainous wasteland) after the death
of his wife Matilda (Christine Taylor), learns that he can try to win back
custody of his son. He takes a modeling gig in Rome offered by Alexanya Atoz
(Kristen Wiig), a designer who floats and adds unnecessary vowels to words
(Perhaps confirming that the plot doesn't matter, Wiig renders herself
indecipherable, meaning a lot of expository dialogue is lost).

Joining
Derek is his old foe-turned-friend-turned-foe Hansel (Owen Wilson), who was
"disfigured" in the accident that killed Derek's wife. Hansel now
lives in Malibu (portrayed as a vast desert) with the members of an orgy that
apparently went pretty well. Everyone in the group—man, woman, and farm
animal—is now pregnant, and Hansel can't handle the pressure of becoming a
father. It's an amusing setup, and it's especially funny when his current orgy
walks in on Hansel cheating on them with another group (Kiefer Sutherland plays
himself as the mouthpiece for the group, wondering how Hansel possibly could
love himself if he can't commit to 12 people).

The two
models are now relics of a bygone era, with the current world of fashion
rallying around hipster apathy, disdain disguised as ironic appreciation for
anything retro, and an androgynous model named All (Benedict Cumberbatch). Like
its predecessor, the movie doesn't have any satirical insight about its targets.
Simply the observation has changed. In the first movie, there jokes were about
how phony and dumb the fashion world was, and in the sequel, they're about how
phony and weird it is.

From
the story of Derek trying to find and regain custody of Derek Jr., the plot
shifts to a biblical prophecy involving the descendant of the third person in
the Garden of Eden, brings back the villainous Mugatu (Will Ferrell) to engage
in a funny battle of wits with Derek, and somehow ends with a battle of steely
gazes over a pit of lava. Penélope Cruz plays an Interpol agent who wants to
uncover whatever criminal conspiracy is happening here, and like her
love-interest predecessor, Cruz' character doesn't have the heart to tell Derek
that he's too stupid for her.

That's
the biggest problem: This character has a short comic shelf life. We get it,
already: He's really dumb. Zoolander 2
doesn't find any significant way to expand or challenge that rudimentary
conceit.